Events on Tuesday, March 12th, 2013

Abstract: The direct and indirect consequences of climate change on forests of North America are only beginning to unfold. Tree health will be directly affected by changing temperature and precipitation patterns. However, just as important are the effects of a changing climate on many of the natural disturbance processes such as wildfire and insect outbreaks that have shaped forest ecosystems for millennia. As trees are relatively long-lived organisms, climate-driven changes to forest ecosystems may be subtle until a disturbance catalyzes change and sends the system along a new trajectory. This talk will include a look into what we can expect in western forests under new climatic and disturbance regimes.<br>

Abstract: A series of weekly presentations and discussions of current research topics in physics by the scientists involved in those studies designed to expose students to the topics and excitement of the research frontier.

Abstract: The lack of observation of superpartners at the Large Hadron Collider so far has led to a renewed interest in supersymmetric (SUSY) models with R-parity violation (RPV). With the additional assumption of holomorphic Minimal Flavor Violation (MFV), baryonic RPV dominates and the strongest bounds can be evaded. I demonstrate the sensitivity of same-sign lepton searches at the LHC to MFV/RPV SUSY in two different scenarios. In the first, production of neutral "mesinos" which oscillate yields an observable signature. In the second, production of Majorana gluinos generates same-sign leptons with large production cross-section. I reinterpret current results to place bounds on these scenarios and discuss methods to enhance the signature in future searches.